Most modern critics (even those who have emphasized the ‘evolution’ of Montaigne's ideas) have sought to explain away the contradictions and incoherences of Montaigne's Essais. This book investigates ...
More

Most modern critics (even those who have emphasized the ‘evolution’ of Montaigne's ideas) have sought to explain away the contradictions and incoherences of Montaigne's Essais. This book investigates the role of these internal differences in the opinions recorded, in voices and modes of discourse, in logical levels, in conceptions of writing and of reading, through a series of careful, lucid readings of selected passages from the Essais. The author tracks their operation in Montaigne's text and shows how Montaigne's writing constantly recontextualizes his own discourse (through his practice of interpolating new material in successive editions and adding new chapters) as well as that of other authors (through quotation, paraphrase, commentary). Rather than merely negative features, the author argues that such ‘differences’ are essential to a practice of writing that both defines and challenges a notion of ‘unity’, and can be seen as an uneasy and disturbing element related to a historical shift from earlier ways of controlling meaning, to one based on ‘the author function’.Less

Distinguo: Reading Montaigne Differently

Steven Rendall

Published in print: 1992-04-16

Most modern critics (even those who have emphasized the ‘evolution’ of Montaigne's ideas) have sought to explain away the contradictions and incoherences of Montaigne's Essais. This book investigates the role of these internal differences in the opinions recorded, in voices and modes of discourse, in logical levels, in conceptions of writing and of reading, through a series of careful, lucid readings of selected passages from the Essais. The author tracks their operation in Montaigne's text and shows how Montaigne's writing constantly recontextualizes his own discourse (through his practice of interpolating new material in successive editions and adding new chapters) as well as that of other authors (through quotation, paraphrase, commentary). Rather than merely negative features, the author argues that such ‘differences’ are essential to a practice of writing that both defines and challenges a notion of ‘unity’, and can be seen as an uneasy and disturbing element related to a historical shift from earlier ways of controlling meaning, to one based on ‘the author function’.

This book examines the relationship between epic literature and the sister arts in the French Renaissance. An initial paradox—the seeming ubiquity of epic heroes, themes, and motifs in the sister ...
More

This book examines the relationship between epic literature and the sister arts in the French Renaissance. An initial paradox—the seeming ubiquity of epic heroes, themes, and motifs in the sister arts, compared to the poor reputation of literary epics written at the same time—gives way to a methodology that seeks out the concrete connections between the two domains. It is argued throughout that artists and translators, writers, patrons, and readers all belonged to overlapping interpretive communities and that a reappraisal of the much-maligned genre appears once we seek to understand how epic poets and artists (painters, but also sculptors, architects, tapestry-makers, etc.) respond to, and dialogue with, each other. Sometimes in competition over patrons, sometimes borrowing artistic methods, and sometimes in open revolt because of opposed political or religious positions, the various parties are shown to be involved in intense arguments over interpretation. Chapters deal subsequently with the French epic galleries, decorated by episodes from Homer, Virgil, and Lucan; with a pair of epics written by Etienne Dolet; with Ronsard’s Franciade; and finally with Agrippa D’Aubigné’s Tragiques.Less

Epic Arts in Renaissance France

Phillip John Usher

Published in print: 2013-12-05

This book examines the relationship between epic literature and the sister arts in the French Renaissance. An initial paradox—the seeming ubiquity of epic heroes, themes, and motifs in the sister arts, compared to the poor reputation of literary epics written at the same time—gives way to a methodology that seeks out the concrete connections between the two domains. It is argued throughout that artists and translators, writers, patrons, and readers all belonged to overlapping interpretive communities and that a reappraisal of the much-maligned genre appears once we seek to understand how epic poets and artists (painters, but also sculptors, architects, tapestry-makers, etc.) respond to, and dialogue with, each other. Sometimes in competition over patrons, sometimes borrowing artistic methods, and sometimes in open revolt because of opposed political or religious positions, the various parties are shown to be involved in intense arguments over interpretation. Chapters deal subsequently with the French epic galleries, decorated by episodes from Homer, Virgil, and Lucan; with a pair of epics written by Etienne Dolet; with Ronsard’s Franciade; and finally with Agrippa D’Aubigné’s Tragiques.

Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550–1610) ...
More

Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550–1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. And yet although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. This book describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the ‘haunted house’, the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures (Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigné) as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, the book sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity.Less

Ghost Stories in Late Renaissance France : Walking by Night

Timothy Chesters

Published in print: 2011-01-01

Caught in the grip of savage religious war, fear of sorcery and the devil, and a deepening crisis of epistemological uncertainty, the intellectual climate of late Renaissance France (c. 1550–1610) was one of the most haunted in European history. And yet although existing studies of this climate have been attentive to the extensive body of writing on witchcraft and demons, they have had little to say of its ghosts. Combining techniques of literary criticism, intellectual history, and the history of the book, this study examines a large and hitherto unexplored corpus of ghost stories in late Renaissance French writing. These are shown to have arisen in a range of contexts far broader than was previously thought: whether in Protestant polemic against the doctrine of purgatory, humanist discussions of friendship, the growing ethnographic consciousness of New World ghost beliefs, or courtroom wrangles over haunted property. This book describes how, over the course of this period, we also begin to see emerge characteristics recognisable from modern ghost tales: the setting of the ‘haunted house’, the eroticised ghost, or the embodied revenant. Taking in prominent literary figures (Rabelais, Ronsard, Montaigne, d'Aubigné) as well as forgotten demonological tracts and sensationalist pamphlets, the book sheds new light on the beliefs, fears, and desires of a period on the threshold of modernity.

The concept of imitation — the imitation of classical and vernacular texts — was the dominant critical and creative principle in Italian Renaissance literature. Linked to modern notions of ...
More

The concept of imitation — the imitation of classical and vernacular texts — was the dominant critical and creative principle in Italian Renaissance literature. Linked to modern notions of intertextuality, imitation has been much discussed recently, but this is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of Italian Renaissance ideas on imitation, covering both theory and practice, and both Latin and vernacular works. The author charts the emergence of the idea, in vague terms in Dante, then in Petrarch's more precise reconstruction of classical imitatio, before concentrating on the major writers of the Quattrocento. Some chapters deal with key humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla and Pico della Mirandola, while others discuss each of the major vernacular figures in the debate, including Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano, and Pietro Bembo. For the first time scholars and students have an up-to-date account of the development of Ciceronianism in both Latin and the vernacular before 1530, and the book provides fresh insights into some of the canonical works of Italian literature from Dante to Bembo.Less

Literary Imitation in the Italian Renaissance : The Theory and Practice of Literary Imitation in Italy from Dante to Bembo

Martin L. McLaughlin

Published in print: 1996-03-28

The concept of imitation — the imitation of classical and vernacular texts — was the dominant critical and creative principle in Italian Renaissance literature. Linked to modern notions of intertextuality, imitation has been much discussed recently, but this is the first book to offer a comprehensive survey of Italian Renaissance ideas on imitation, covering both theory and practice, and both Latin and vernacular works. The author charts the emergence of the idea, in vague terms in Dante, then in Petrarch's more precise reconstruction of classical imitatio, before concentrating on the major writers of the Quattrocento. Some chapters deal with key humanists, such as Lorenzo Valla and Pico della Mirandola, while others discuss each of the major vernacular figures in the debate, including Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, Angelo Poliziano, and Pietro Bembo. For the first time scholars and students have an up-to-date account of the development of Ciceronianism in both Latin and the vernacular before 1530, and the book provides fresh insights into some of the canonical works of Italian literature from Dante to Bembo.

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterized by panic ...
More

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterized by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. Many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth; others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life, determining ideas of identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in practice and theory, concentrating on a series of particular events, which are read in terms of academic debates and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.Less

Lying in Early Modern English Culture : From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance

Andrew Hadfield

Published in print: 2017-09-21

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterized by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. Many saw the need for a secular power to define the truth; others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life, determining ideas of identity, politics, speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in practice and theory, concentrating on a series of particular events, which are read in terms of academic debates and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; works of literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

As an age-old metaphor for the sexual chase, the hunt provides a uniquely conflicted site for the representation of masculinity. On the one hand, hunting had from ancient times served to define a ...
More

As an age-old metaphor for the sexual chase, the hunt provides a uniquely conflicted site for the representation of masculinity. On the one hand, hunting had from ancient times served to define a culturally approved mode of masculinity as heroic, pursuant, and goal-oriented, where success was measured by the achievement of the objectives set: the capture and killing of prey. When applied to love, on the other hand, hunting was inflected quite differently. At first glance, the basic scenario of a male subject pursuing elusive quarry over which he ultimately comes to assert control might seem to epitomise the dynamic of the sexual chase, yet when poets invoke the hunt in an amorous context, this most obvious manifestation of the metaphor is not the one they put to use. On the contrary, in lyric poetry and romance, the hunt metaphor serves to demote or destabilise the masculine subject in some way. The huntsman is routinely a figure of failure: for all his efforts, he either fails to catch what he pursues, catches the wrong thing, ends up being caught by others, or runs round in circles chasing himself. His failure is measured precisely as a shortfall from the cultural ideal. The metaphor of the hunt thus opens up possibilities for exploring definitions of masculinity that deviate from culturally approved models of mastery and power. It shows how limited those models are and offers examples of alternative and counter-cultural versions of a masculine subjectivity that radically query patriarchal stereotypes of gender and class.Less

Masculinity and the Hunt : Wyatt to Spenser

Catherine Bates

Published in print: 2013-03-21

As an age-old metaphor for the sexual chase, the hunt provides a uniquely conflicted site for the representation of masculinity. On the one hand, hunting had from ancient times served to define a culturally approved mode of masculinity as heroic, pursuant, and goal-oriented, where success was measured by the achievement of the objectives set: the capture and killing of prey. When applied to love, on the other hand, hunting was inflected quite differently. At first glance, the basic scenario of a male subject pursuing elusive quarry over which he ultimately comes to assert control might seem to epitomise the dynamic of the sexual chase, yet when poets invoke the hunt in an amorous context, this most obvious manifestation of the metaphor is not the one they put to use. On the contrary, in lyric poetry and romance, the hunt metaphor serves to demote or destabilise the masculine subject in some way. The huntsman is routinely a figure of failure: for all his efforts, he either fails to catch what he pursues, catches the wrong thing, ends up being caught by others, or runs round in circles chasing himself. His failure is measured precisely as a shortfall from the cultural ideal. The metaphor of the hunt thus opens up possibilities for exploring definitions of masculinity that deviate from culturally approved models of mastery and power. It shows how limited those models are and offers examples of alternative and counter-cultural versions of a masculine subjectivity that radically query patriarchal stereotypes of gender and class.

To call something ‘monstrous’ in the mid-sixteenth century is, more often than not, to wonder at its enormous size: it is to call to mind something like a whale; by the late seventeenth century ...
More

To call something ‘monstrous’ in the mid-sixteenth century is, more often than not, to wonder at its enormous size: it is to call to mind something like a whale; by the late seventeenth century ‘monstrous’ is more likely to denote hidden intentions, unspoken desires. Several shifts are at work in this word history, as in what Shakespeare's Othello terms the ‘mighty magic’ of stories about monsters. These shifts can be described in a number of ways. The clearest and most compelling is the migration of monsters from natural history to moral philosophy, from the margins of maps to a central role in the drama of human motivation, of sexual and political identity. A (richly illustrated) meditation on monsters of various descriptions, from natural phenomena to members of the same human family, this study offers a new account of the place of monsters in the early modern imagination. Literature makes a particular kind of sense when studied in relation to what anthropologists call ‘thick descriptions’ of context. This study relates the peculiar questions and insights proposed by literary writing to those produced by historians of science, of religious conflict (this was a time of civil war and persistent rebellion), as of printing, philosophy, natural history, and medicine. At its centre are readings of major works of early modern French literature — from Rabelais to Racine, from the 1540s to the early 1690s — in which monsters do meaningful work. From these focal points, digressions are undertaken through the archives of the history of medicine as of politics, the visual representation of monsters, and the reception of classical antiquity. Each new chapter establishes the contours of the intellectual context within which change takes place, and so leads us to better understand the issues and questions raised throughout. Charting a process of sustained and distinctive transformation, this book seeks to understand the cultural work performed by monsters in early modern Europe: monsters in books, in paintings, onstage, and in the street; in the study, as in the state, and the self.Less

Monsters and their Meanings in Early Modern Culture : Mighty Magic

Wes Williams

Published in print: 2011-05-01

To call something ‘monstrous’ in the mid-sixteenth century is, more often than not, to wonder at its enormous size: it is to call to mind something like a whale; by the late seventeenth century ‘monstrous’ is more likely to denote hidden intentions, unspoken desires. Several shifts are at work in this word history, as in what Shakespeare's Othello terms the ‘mighty magic’ of stories about monsters. These shifts can be described in a number of ways. The clearest and most compelling is the migration of monsters from natural history to moral philosophy, from the margins of maps to a central role in the drama of human motivation, of sexual and political identity. A (richly illustrated) meditation on monsters of various descriptions, from natural phenomena to members of the same human family, this study offers a new account of the place of monsters in the early modern imagination. Literature makes a particular kind of sense when studied in relation to what anthropologists call ‘thick descriptions’ of context. This study relates the peculiar questions and insights proposed by literary writing to those produced by historians of science, of religious conflict (this was a time of civil war and persistent rebellion), as of printing, philosophy, natural history, and medicine. At its centre are readings of major works of early modern French literature — from Rabelais to Racine, from the 1540s to the early 1690s — in which monsters do meaningful work. From these focal points, digressions are undertaken through the archives of the history of medicine as of politics, the visual representation of monsters, and the reception of classical antiquity. Each new chapter establishes the contours of the intellectual context within which change takes place, and so leads us to better understand the issues and questions raised throughout. Charting a process of sustained and distinctive transformation, this book seeks to understand the cultural work performed by monsters in early modern Europe: monsters in books, in paintings, onstage, and in the street; in the study, as in the state, and the self.

Montaigne’s English Journey examines the genesis, early readership, and multifaceted impact of John Florio’s exuberant translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Published in London in ...
More

Montaigne’s English Journey examines the genesis, early readership, and multifaceted impact of John Florio’s exuberant translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Published in London in 1603, this book was widely read in seventeenth-century England: Shakespeare borrowed from it as he drafted King Lear and The Tempest, and many hundreds of English men and women first encountered Montaigne’s tolerant outlook and disarming candour in its densely-printed pages. Literary historians have long been fascinated by the influence of Florio’s translation, analysing its contributions to the development of the English essay and tracing its appropriation in the work of Webster, Dryden, and other major writers. William M. Hamlin, by contrast, undertakes an exploration of Florio’s Montaigne within the overlapping realms of print and manuscript culture, assessing its importance from the varied perspectives of its earliest English readers. Drawing on letters, diaries, commonplace books, and thousands of marginal annotations inscribed in surviving copies of Florio’s volume, Hamlin offers a comprehensive account of the transmission and reception of Montaigne in seventeenth-century England. In particular he focuses on topics that consistently intrigued Montaigne’s English readers: sexuality, marriage, conscience, theatricality, scepticism, self-presentation, the nature of wisdom, and the power of custom. All in all, Hamlin’s study constitutes a major contribution to investigations of literary readership in pre-Enlightenment Europe.Less

Montaigne's English Journey : Reading the Essays in Shakespeare's Day

William M. Hamlin

Published in print: 2013-11-14

Montaigne’s English Journey examines the genesis, early readership, and multifaceted impact of John Florio’s exuberant translation of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays. Published in London in 1603, this book was widely read in seventeenth-century England: Shakespeare borrowed from it as he drafted King Lear and The Tempest, and many hundreds of English men and women first encountered Montaigne’s tolerant outlook and disarming candour in its densely-printed pages. Literary historians have long been fascinated by the influence of Florio’s translation, analysing its contributions to the development of the English essay and tracing its appropriation in the work of Webster, Dryden, and other major writers. William M. Hamlin, by contrast, undertakes an exploration of Florio’s Montaigne within the overlapping realms of print and manuscript culture, assessing its importance from the varied perspectives of its earliest English readers. Drawing on letters, diaries, commonplace books, and thousands of marginal annotations inscribed in surviving copies of Florio’s volume, Hamlin offers a comprehensive account of the transmission and reception of Montaigne in seventeenth-century England. In particular he focuses on topics that consistently intrigued Montaigne’s English readers: sexuality, marriage, conscience, theatricality, scepticism, self-presentation, the nature of wisdom, and the power of custom. All in all, Hamlin’s study constitutes a major contribution to investigations of literary readership in pre-Enlightenment Europe.

Since the nineteenth century, it has been assumed that the concept of personal identity in the early modern period is bound up with secularization. Indeed, many explanations of the emergence of ...
More

Since the nineteenth century, it has been assumed that the concept of personal identity in the early modern period is bound up with secularization. Indeed, many explanations of the emergence of modernity have been based on this thesis, in which Shakespeare as a secular author has played a central role. However, the idea of secularization is now everywhere under threat. The secularity of modern society is less apparent than it was a generation ago. Shakespeare, too, has come to be seen in a religious perspective. What happens to human identity in this different framework? This book asks what selfhood looks like if we do not assume that an idea of the self could only come into being as a result of an emptying out of a religious framework. It does so by examining human mortality. What it is to be human, and how a life is framed by its ending, are issues that cross religious confessions in early modernity, and interrogate the sacred and secular divide. A series of chapters examines literature and art in relation to concepts such as conscience, martyrdom, soliloquy, luck, suicide, and embodiment. Religious and philosophical creativity are revealed as poised around anxieties about finitude and contingency, challenging conventional divisions between kinds of literary and artistic endeavour. This book considers incipient genres of life writing (More, Foxe and Montaigne) and life drawing (D00FCrer, Hans Baldung Grien) in relation to dramatic representation and literary narration (Shakespeare, Donne, Milton). In the process it asks whether the problem of human identity rewrites historical boundaries.Less

Mortal Thoughts : Religion, Secularity, & Identity in Shakespeare and Early Modern Culture

Brian Cummings

Published in print: 2013-08-29

Since the nineteenth century, it has been assumed that the concept of personal identity in the early modern period is bound up with secularization. Indeed, many explanations of the emergence of modernity have been based on this thesis, in which Shakespeare as a secular author has played a central role. However, the idea of secularization is now everywhere under threat. The secularity of modern society is less apparent than it was a generation ago. Shakespeare, too, has come to be seen in a religious perspective. What happens to human identity in this different framework? This book asks what selfhood looks like if we do not assume that an idea of the self could only come into being as a result of an emptying out of a religious framework. It does so by examining human mortality. What it is to be human, and how a life is framed by its ending, are issues that cross religious confessions in early modernity, and interrogate the sacred and secular divide. A series of chapters examines literature and art in relation to concepts such as conscience, martyrdom, soliloquy, luck, suicide, and embodiment. Religious and philosophical creativity are revealed as poised around anxieties about finitude and contingency, challenging conventional divisions between kinds of literary and artistic endeavour. This book considers incipient genres of life writing (More, Foxe and Montaigne) and life drawing (D00FCrer, Hans Baldung Grien) in relation to dramatic representation and literary narration (Shakespeare, Donne, Milton). In the process it asks whether the problem of human identity rewrites historical boundaries.

This book studies the place and meaning of pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. It makes new material available and also provides fresh perspectives on canonical writers such as Rabelais, ...
More

This book studies the place and meaning of pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. It makes new material available and also provides fresh perspectives on canonical writers such as Rabelais, Montaigne, Marguerite de Navarre, Erasmus, Petrarch, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. The book undertakes a bold exploration of various interlinking themes in Renaissance pilgrimage: the location, representation, and politics of the sacred, together with the experience of the everyday, the extraordinary, the religious, and the represented. It also examines the literary formation of the subjective narrative voice in the texts examined, and its relationship to the rituals and practices the book reviews. This book aims both to gain a sense of the shapes of pilgrim experience in the Renaissance and to question the ways in which recent theoretical and historical research in the area has determined the differences between fictional worlds and the real.Less

Pilgrimage and Narrative in the French Renaissance : 'The Undiscovered Country'

Wes Williams

Published in print: 1998-11-26

This book studies the place and meaning of pilgrimage in European Renaissance culture. It makes new material available and also provides fresh perspectives on canonical writers such as Rabelais, Montaigne, Marguerite de Navarre, Erasmus, Petrarch, Augustine, and Gregory of Nyssa. The book undertakes a bold exploration of various interlinking themes in Renaissance pilgrimage: the location, representation, and politics of the sacred, together with the experience of the everyday, the extraordinary, the religious, and the represented. It also examines the literary formation of the subjective narrative voice in the texts examined, and its relationship to the rituals and practices the book reviews. This book aims both to gain a sense of the shapes of pilgrim experience in the Renaissance and to question the ways in which recent theoretical and historical research in the area has determined the differences between fictional worlds and the real.

This title traces the artistic development of one of the major poets of the French Renaissance, Joachim Du Bellay (1522–60), showing how he differed from his contemporaries (in particular his great ...
More

This title traces the artistic development of one of the major poets of the French Renaissance, Joachim Du Bellay (1522–60), showing how he differed from his contemporaries (in particular his great rival Ronsard) and the importance of his move to Rome in 1553. In this unique study of Du Bellay and his Antiquitez de Rome, Dr Tucker makes this complex sonnet sequence more accessible to the modern reader, highlighting its rich intertextual framework in Classical, neo-Latin and vernacular literature. He also redresses a critical imbalance. Du Bellay and his immediate contemporaries identified the Antiquitez, rather than the Regrets, as his major work. The author demonstrates its central importance within the poet's production, and further situates it within a whole tradition of reflection upon Rome and her destiny from Classical times onwards. The Antiquitez is also seen to represent the ultimate step in the development of a poetic style and sensibility in diametric opposition to Ronsard's. Finally, the author also relates the collection to the literary and scholarly context of Du Bellay's Rome.Less

The Poet's Odyssey : Joachim Du Bellay and the Antiquitez de Rome

George Hugo Tucker

Published in print: 1990-11-22

This title traces the artistic development of one of the major poets of the French Renaissance, Joachim Du Bellay (1522–60), showing how he differed from his contemporaries (in particular his great rival Ronsard) and the importance of his move to Rome in 1553. In this unique study of Du Bellay and his Antiquitez de Rome, Dr Tucker makes this complex sonnet sequence more accessible to the modern reader, highlighting its rich intertextual framework in Classical, neo-Latin and vernacular literature. He also redresses a critical imbalance. Du Bellay and his immediate contemporaries identified the Antiquitez, rather than the Regrets, as his major work. The author demonstrates its central importance within the poet's production, and further situates it within a whole tradition of reflection upon Rome and her destiny from Classical times onwards. The Antiquitez is also seen to represent the ultimate step in the development of a poetic style and sensibility in diametric opposition to Ronsard's. Finally, the author also relates the collection to the literary and scholarly context of Du Bellay's Rome.

This book studies supplication as a social and literary event in the long European Renaissance. It argues that scenes of supplication are defining episodes in a literary tradition stretching back to ...
More

This book studies supplication as a social and literary event in the long European Renaissance. It argues that scenes of supplication are defining episodes in a literary tradition stretching back to Greco-Roman antiquity, taking us to the heart of fundamental questions of politics and religion, ethics and identity, sexuality and family. As a perennial mode of asymmetrical communication in moments of helplessness and extreme need, supplication speaks to ways that people live together despite grave inequalities. It is a strategy that societies use to regulate and perpetuate themselves, to negotiate conflict, and to manage situations in which relationships threaten to unravel. All the writers discussed here—Vergil, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton—find supplication indispensable for thinking about problems of antagonism, difference, and hierarchy, bringing the aesthetic resources of supplicatory interactions to bear on their unique literary and cultural circumstances. The opening chapters establish a conceptual framework for thinking about supplication as facilitating transitions between states of feeling and positions of relative status, beginning with Homer and classical literature. Vergil’s Aeneid is a paradigmatic instance in which literary and social structures of the ancient past are transformed to suit the needs of the present, and supplication becomes a figure for the act of cultural translation. Subsequent chapters take up different aspects of Renaissance supplicatory discourse, showing how postures of humiliation and abjection are appropriated and transformed in erotic poetry, drama, and epic. The book ends with Milton who invests gestures of self-abasement with unexpected dignity.Less

Renaissance Suppliants : Poetry, Antiquity, Reconciliation

Leah Whittington

Published in print: 2016-05-01

This book studies supplication as a social and literary event in the long European Renaissance. It argues that scenes of supplication are defining episodes in a literary tradition stretching back to Greco-Roman antiquity, taking us to the heart of fundamental questions of politics and religion, ethics and identity, sexuality and family. As a perennial mode of asymmetrical communication in moments of helplessness and extreme need, supplication speaks to ways that people live together despite grave inequalities. It is a strategy that societies use to regulate and perpetuate themselves, to negotiate conflict, and to manage situations in which relationships threaten to unravel. All the writers discussed here—Vergil, Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Milton—find supplication indispensable for thinking about problems of antagonism, difference, and hierarchy, bringing the aesthetic resources of supplicatory interactions to bear on their unique literary and cultural circumstances. The opening chapters establish a conceptual framework for thinking about supplication as facilitating transitions between states of feeling and positions of relative status, beginning with Homer and classical literature. Vergil’s Aeneid is a paradigmatic instance in which literary and social structures of the ancient past are transformed to suit the needs of the present, and supplication becomes a figure for the act of cultural translation. Subsequent chapters take up different aspects of Renaissance supplicatory discourse, showing how postures of humiliation and abjection are appropriated and transformed in erotic poetry, drama, and epic. The book ends with Milton who invests gestures of self-abasement with unexpected dignity.

Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Molière’s famous comedy, L’Avare? As wars and economic crises ravaged France on the threshold of ...
More

Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Molière’s famous comedy, L’Avare? As wars and economic crises ravaged France on the threshold of modernity, avarice was said to be flourishing as never before. Yet by the late sixteenth century, a number of French writers would argue that in some contexts, avaricious behaviour was not straightforwardly sinful or harmful. Considerations of social rank, gender, object pursued, time, and circumstance led some to question age-old beliefs. Traditionally reviled groups (rapacious usurers, greedy lawyers, miserly fathers, covetous women) might still exhibit unmistakable signs of avarice-but perhaps not invariably, in an age of shifting social, economic and intellectual values. Across a large, diverse corpus of French texts, this book shows how a range of flexible genres nourished by humanism tended to offset traditional condemnation of avarice and avares with innovative, mitigating perspectives, arising from subjective experience. In such writings, an avaricious disposition could be re-described as something less vicious, excusable, or even expedient. In this word history of avarice, close readings of well-known authors (Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Montaigne), and of their lesser-known contemporaries are connected to broader socio-economic developments of the late French Renaissance (c.1540-1615). The final chapter situates key themes in relation to Molière’s L’Avare. As such, this book newly illuminates debates about avarice within broader cultural preoccupations surrounding gender, enrichment and status in early modern France.Less

Representing Avarice in Late Renaissance France

Jonathan Patterson

Published in print: 2015-01-29

Why did people talk so much about avarice in late Renaissance France, nearly a century before Molière’s famous comedy, L’Avare? As wars and economic crises ravaged France on the threshold of modernity, avarice was said to be flourishing as never before. Yet by the late sixteenth century, a number of French writers would argue that in some contexts, avaricious behaviour was not straightforwardly sinful or harmful. Considerations of social rank, gender, object pursued, time, and circumstance led some to question age-old beliefs. Traditionally reviled groups (rapacious usurers, greedy lawyers, miserly fathers, covetous women) might still exhibit unmistakable signs of avarice-but perhaps not invariably, in an age of shifting social, economic and intellectual values. Across a large, diverse corpus of French texts, this book shows how a range of flexible genres nourished by humanism tended to offset traditional condemnation of avarice and avares with innovative, mitigating perspectives, arising from subjective experience. In such writings, an avaricious disposition could be re-described as something less vicious, excusable, or even expedient. In this word history of avarice, close readings of well-known authors (Marguerite de Navarre, Ronsard, Montaigne), and of their lesser-known contemporaries are connected to broader socio-economic developments of the late French Renaissance (c.1540-1615). The final chapter situates key themes in relation to Molière’s L’Avare. As such, this book newly illuminates debates about avarice within broader cultural preoccupations surrounding gender, enrichment and status in early modern France.

For all the fame he won as a writer during a brief but astonishingly fertile period in the 1750s and early 1760s, Rousseau saw the making of books as essentially foreign to his nature: what mattered ...
More

For all the fame he won as a writer during a brief but astonishingly fertile period in the 1750s and early 1760s, Rousseau saw the making of books as essentially foreign to his nature: what mattered most to him was making things. Descended as he was from a long line of watchmakers, and raised in the artisanal heart of Geneva, he helped the promotion of craft associated with his one-time friend Diderot, whose Encyclopédie proclaimed the varied virtues of manual activity. Taking as its point of departure the moral and monetary economy of craftsmanship in eighteenth-century Switzerland, this elegant and original study shows how family tradition and his own unfinished apprenticeship to an engraver led Rousseau to a radical questioning of central issues of the day, particularly in light of the moral utilitarianism of his age. Rousseau’s Hand highlights the vital place of handwork in the educational, artistic, and social writings of his middle years, from novels and plays to treatises and other forms of discourse, illuminating matters traditionally seen as inconsistencies in his œuvre. He celebrated homo faber’s integrity along with the practicality and usefulness of manual work in the face of depersonalising technological advance, yet the writings in which he extolled these virtues won him persecution as well as European celebrity. The paradox of craft’s material essence in what he thought a world of abhorrent materialism and the problematic mechanization of ordinary existence exercised him throughout his life. Rousseau’s Hand explores these preoccupations.Less

Rousseau's Hand : The Crafting of a Writer

Angelica Goodden

Published in print: 2013-10-31

For all the fame he won as a writer during a brief but astonishingly fertile period in the 1750s and early 1760s, Rousseau saw the making of books as essentially foreign to his nature: what mattered most to him was making things. Descended as he was from a long line of watchmakers, and raised in the artisanal heart of Geneva, he helped the promotion of craft associated with his one-time friend Diderot, whose Encyclopédie proclaimed the varied virtues of manual activity. Taking as its point of departure the moral and monetary economy of craftsmanship in eighteenth-century Switzerland, this elegant and original study shows how family tradition and his own unfinished apprenticeship to an engraver led Rousseau to a radical questioning of central issues of the day, particularly in light of the moral utilitarianism of his age. Rousseau’s Hand highlights the vital place of handwork in the educational, artistic, and social writings of his middle years, from novels and plays to treatises and other forms of discourse, illuminating matters traditionally seen as inconsistencies in his œuvre. He celebrated homo faber’s integrity along with the practicality and usefulness of manual work in the face of depersonalising technological advance, yet the writings in which he extolled these virtues won him persecution as well as European celebrity. The paradox of craft’s material essence in what he thought a world of abhorrent materialism and the problematic mechanization of ordinary existence exercised him throughout his life. Rousseau’s Hand explores these preoccupations.

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne’s Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern Western university. Volume 1 focuses on contexts from ...
More

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne’s Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern Western university. Volume 1 focuses on contexts from within Montaigne’s own milieu, and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius. Volume 2 focuses on the reader-writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript. The two volumes work together to offer a new picture of the book’s significance in literary and intellectual history. The school of Montaigne potentially included everyone in early modern Europe with occasion and means to read and write for themselves and for their friends and family, unconstrained by an official function or scholastic institution. The Essais were shaped by the post-Reformation battle to regulate the educated individual’s judgement in reading and acting upon the two books bequeathed by God to man. The book of scriptures and the book of nature were becoming more accessible through print and manuscript cultures. But at the same time that access was being mediated more intensively by teachers such as clerics and humanists, by censors and institutions, by learned authors of past and present, and by commentaries and glosses upon those authors. Montaigne enfranchised the unofficial reader-writer with liberties of judgement offered and taken in the specific historical conditions of his era.Less

The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe : Volume Two: The Reader-Writer

Warren Boutcher

Published in print: 2017-03-16

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne’s Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern Western university. Volume 1 focuses on contexts from within Montaigne’s own milieu, and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius. Volume 2 focuses on the reader-writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript. The two volumes work together to offer a new picture of the book’s significance in literary and intellectual history. The school of Montaigne potentially included everyone in early modern Europe with occasion and means to read and write for themselves and for their friends and family, unconstrained by an official function or scholastic institution. The Essais were shaped by the post-Reformation battle to regulate the educated individual’s judgement in reading and acting upon the two books bequeathed by God to man. The book of scriptures and the book of nature were becoming more accessible through print and manuscript cultures. But at the same time that access was being mediated more intensively by teachers such as clerics and humanists, by censors and institutions, by learned authors of past and present, and by commentaries and glosses upon those authors. Montaigne enfranchised the unofficial reader-writer with liberties of judgement offered and taken in the specific historical conditions of his era.

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne’s Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern Western university. Volume 1 focuses on contexts from ...
More

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne’s Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern Western university. Volume 1 focuses on contexts from within Montaigne’s own milieu, and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius. Volume 2 focuses on the reader-writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript. The two volumes work together to offer a new picture of the book’s significance in literary and intellectual history. The school of Montaigne potentially included everyone in early modern Europe with occasion and means to read and write for themselves and for their friends and family, unconstrained by an official function or scholastic institution. The Essais were shaped by the post-Reformation battle to regulate the educated individual’s judgement in reading and acting upon the two books bequeathed by God to man. The book of scriptures and the book of nature were becoming more accessible through print and manuscript cultures. But at the same time that access was being mediated more intensively by teachers such as clerics and humanists, by censors and institutions, by learned authors of past and present, and by commentaries and glosses upon those authors. Montaigne enfranchised the unofficial reader-writer with liberties of judgement offered and taken in the specific historical conditions of his era.Less

The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe : Volume One: The Patron Author

Warren Boutcher

Published in print: 2017-03-16

This major two-volume study offers an interdisciplinary analysis of Montaigne’s Essais and their fortunes in early modern Europe and the modern Western university. Volume 1 focuses on contexts from within Montaigne’s own milieu, and on the ways in which his book made him a patron-author or instant classic in the eyes of his editor Marie de Gournay and his promoter Justus Lipsius. Volume 2 focuses on the reader-writers across Europe who used the Essais to make their own works, from corrected editions and translations in print, to life-writing and personal records in manuscript. The two volumes work together to offer a new picture of the book’s significance in literary and intellectual history. The school of Montaigne potentially included everyone in early modern Europe with occasion and means to read and write for themselves and for their friends and family, unconstrained by an official function or scholastic institution. The Essais were shaped by the post-Reformation battle to regulate the educated individual’s judgement in reading and acting upon the two books bequeathed by God to man. The book of scriptures and the book of nature were becoming more accessible through print and manuscript cultures. But at the same time that access was being mediated more intensively by teachers such as clerics and humanists, by censors and institutions, by learned authors of past and present, and by commentaries and glosses upon those authors. Montaigne enfranchised the unofficial reader-writer with liberties of judgement offered and taken in the specific historical conditions of his era.

This book analyses the reception of the classical tale of Mars, Venus, and Vulcan in the literature and painting of the Golden Age of Spain. The five chapters assess how Spanish poets and painters ...
More

This book analyses the reception of the classical tale of Mars, Venus, and Vulcan in the literature and painting of the Golden Age of Spain. The five chapters assess how Spanish poets and painters breathed new life into the tale inherited from Homer, Ovid, and others, by examining some of the ways in which the story was disguised, developed, expanded, mocked, combined with, or played off against different subjects, or otherwise modified in order to pique the interest of successive generations of readers and viewers. Each chapter discusses what particular changes and shifts in emphasis reveal about the tale itself, specific renderings, the aims and intentions of individual poets and painters, and the wider context of the literary and visual culture of early modern Spain. Discussing a range of poems by both canonical (e.g. Garcilaso, Góngora, Lope de Vega) and less well-known writers (e.g. Juan de la Cueva, Castillo Solórzano, Polo de Medina), and culminating in detailed examination of two paintings by Velázquez, this book sheds light on questions relating to aspects of classical reception in the Renaissance, the rise of specific styles (epic, mock-epic, burlesque, etc.), the interplay between the sister arts of poetry and painting, and the continual process of imitation and invention that was one of the defining features of the Spanish Golden Age.Less

A Tale Blazed Through Heaven : Imitation and Invention in the Golden Age of Spain

Oliver J. Noble-Wood

Published in print: 2014-10-16

This book analyses the reception of the classical tale of Mars, Venus, and Vulcan in the literature and painting of the Golden Age of Spain. The five chapters assess how Spanish poets and painters breathed new life into the tale inherited from Homer, Ovid, and others, by examining some of the ways in which the story was disguised, developed, expanded, mocked, combined with, or played off against different subjects, or otherwise modified in order to pique the interest of successive generations of readers and viewers. Each chapter discusses what particular changes and shifts in emphasis reveal about the tale itself, specific renderings, the aims and intentions of individual poets and painters, and the wider context of the literary and visual culture of early modern Spain. Discussing a range of poems by both canonical (e.g. Garcilaso, Góngora, Lope de Vega) and less well-known writers (e.g. Juan de la Cueva, Castillo Solórzano, Polo de Medina), and culminating in detailed examination of two paintings by Velázquez, this book sheds light on questions relating to aspects of classical reception in the Renaissance, the rise of specific styles (epic, mock-epic, burlesque, etc.), the interplay between the sister arts of poetry and painting, and the continual process of imitation and invention that was one of the defining features of the Spanish Golden Age.

This book looks at gossip, rumour, and talking too much in Renaissance France and explores why these forms of talk were considered dangerous. Taking its cue from Erasmus’s Lingua, in which both the ...
More

This book looks at gossip, rumour, and talking too much in Renaissance France and explores why these forms of talk were considered dangerous. Taking its cue from Erasmus’s Lingua, in which both the subjective and political consequences of an idle and unbridled tongue are emphasized, the book investigates the impact of gossip and rumour on contemporary conceptions of identity and political engagement. The book discusses prescriptive literature on the tongue and theological discussions of Pentecost and prophecy, and then covers nearly a century in chapters focused on single texts: Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, Ronsard’s Discours des misères de ce temps, Montaigne’s Essais, Brantôme’s Dames galantes, and the anonymous Caquets de l’accouchée. In covering the ‘long sixteenth century’, the book investigates the impact of the French Wars of Religion on perceptions of gossip and rumour, and places them in the context of an emerging public sphere of political critique and discussion, principally through the figure of the ‘public voice’ which, although it was associated with unruly utterance, was nevertheless a powerful rhetorical tool for the expression of grievances. The Cynic virtue of parrhesia, or free speech, is similarly ambivalent in many accounts, oscillating between bold truth-telling (liberté) and disordered babble (licence). Drawing on modern and pre-modern theories of the uses and function of gossip, the book argues that, despite this ambivalence in descriptions of the tongue, gossip, and idle talk were finally excluded from the public sphere by being associated with the feminine and the irrational.Less

The Unbridled Tongue : Babble and Gossip in Renaissance France

Emily Butterworth

Published in print: 2016-02-01

This book looks at gossip, rumour, and talking too much in Renaissance France and explores why these forms of talk were considered dangerous. Taking its cue from Erasmus’s Lingua, in which both the subjective and political consequences of an idle and unbridled tongue are emphasized, the book investigates the impact of gossip and rumour on contemporary conceptions of identity and political engagement. The book discusses prescriptive literature on the tongue and theological discussions of Pentecost and prophecy, and then covers nearly a century in chapters focused on single texts: Rabelais’s Tiers Livre, Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptaméron, Ronsard’s Discours des misères de ce temps, Montaigne’s Essais, Brantôme’s Dames galantes, and the anonymous Caquets de l’accouchée. In covering the ‘long sixteenth century’, the book investigates the impact of the French Wars of Religion on perceptions of gossip and rumour, and places them in the context of an emerging public sphere of political critique and discussion, principally through the figure of the ‘public voice’ which, although it was associated with unruly utterance, was nevertheless a powerful rhetorical tool for the expression of grievances. The Cynic virtue of parrhesia, or free speech, is similarly ambivalent in many accounts, oscillating between bold truth-telling (liberté) and disordered babble (licence). Drawing on modern and pre-modern theories of the uses and function of gossip, the book argues that, despite this ambivalence in descriptions of the tongue, gossip, and idle talk were finally excluded from the public sphere by being associated with the feminine and the irrational.

PRINTED FROM OXFORD SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE (www.oxfordscholarship.com). (c) Copyright Oxford University Press, 2019. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a monograph in OSO for personal use (for details see www.oxfordscholarship.com/page/privacy-policy).date: 22 February 2019